But if your javadocs were in external files and for whatever reason you just had the source code files, no matter how well written the code was it would be a good deal harder to interact with it.

I believe there should be two types of comments, one for programmers that would like to do something weird these shouldn't be in JavaDocs, and the other type for general use.to erikd. Hand generated are better. ~_^

It would be classed as breaking the law of demeter ( http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LawOfDemeter ) but frankly I always thought that rule was junk anyway, you can always work around it but you end up with some hideous code.

Personally I like the XP style method of code the simplest thing possible and refactoring it when I need to, instead of the whole "big design upfront" method where things tend to get overcomplicated.

The answer is really "only if your IDE has a one-click function to unroll it for you" because in real development you very often have to unroll those things later on when you're maintaining / updating / adding new features.

I believe there should be two types of comments, one for programmers that would like to do something weird these shouldn't be in JavaDocs, and the other type for general use.to erikd. Hand generated are better. ~_^

Right. It's called a "manual" and open source might actually be mostly usable (rahter than mostly unusable, with a few gems) if more open source "programmers" knew about these amazing artifacts and how to write them.

The answer is really "only if your IDE has a one-click function to unroll it for you" because in real development you very often have to unroll those things later on when you're maintaining / updating / adding new features.

So ... what?I have no idea what spiders are, and I've no idea what you're saying here. Are you trying to defend a 4k line class?

There are several areas that requires a nasty large code, and complex one on top of that. These are some algorithms from image processing, handling interactions between 1 mill+ entities, handling and analysis of a geographic data, and sometimes also the smart AI.

For example:I seen a 1000 line implementation of DCT. (My implementation of DCT isn't as large, but it needs 2000 operations per load.) There are much more code intensive algorithms however.

Spiders is name for... Let's suppose you'd have these data: "1324", and you need to convert that into this "1234". You'd select one of methods that is called spider.